Consultancy Styles: The Good, The Bad and The Confused.

Greetings all! My name is Aaron Wilfred and I’m currently working as an intern with GolinHarris International. The branch here in Singapore is medium-sized with about 17 staff. This is written after my first two weeks there and I’m glad to say that I’ve been learning a lot from my fellow colleagues these last couple of weeks.

For this blog post, I’d like to address internal communications within a PR consultancy setting as well as various ways in which a PR consultancy can operate and some of its pros and cons. Naturally, everything I’m talking about is through my personal experience this last two weeks.

Let’s start with the two ways I’ve discovered a PR consultancy can operate because that leads into the internal communications issue I will bring up later.

In my building, there’s actually two PR consultancies, one being GolinHarris and the other is our sister firm Weber Shandwick one floor below us. Weber Shandwick has close to around 40 staff which is fairly large for a PR consultancy. They work on fixed teams or specialist teams depending on the type of clients they handle, hence any one person within the team should know roughly what everybody else in the team is doing since they work on the same clients.

GolinHarris works on a best team system and I feel this really works well and would be a good style to adopt for any small to medium sized PR consultancy but it hinges on the fact that internal communications between individuals are good but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The best team system is basically a mix and match of team members who work on various accounts. For instance, I work on a property development client with two other colleagues and my director, but at the same time this team is not fixed as I work on another client with a different colleague and another associate director.

What this means is that I could be working on four or five different accounts and be potentially working with everybody in the entire office. As I was saying earlier, this is a good style to adopt as bonding among employees is a lot higher as opposed to working in fixed teams. Presently, I’ve worked directly with at least 8 of the 17 staff at my firm after two weeks. For a big firm like Weber Shandwick, this style will not work out as well because the number of employees is too large and it would be a nightmare for the directors to coordinate HR efforts and allocate personnel to clients.

What the best team system also offers is the chance for employees who feel strongly about a particular field or client have the opportunity to volunteer to work on those projects. In that way, together with proper HR management from the directors, a team most suited and passionate is formed to work with the client.

There is, of course, a downside to all of this. Having a best team system also means that communications between employees must be good otherwise no one will know what anybody else is working on other than the current account.

An incident occurred this past week which will help to explain my point. A colleague of mine was working on a project for a local brewery but was having trouble coping with building the media list and doing follow up calls with the media at the same time because the client wanted a more comprehensive media list. So she roped me in to help out with the building of the media list and follow up.

However, one thing led to another and suddenly we found ourselves in a meeting with the director and the account manager. Our director was asking why she wasn’t informed of my involvement with the project. She wasn’t scolding my colleague or anything but merely explained logically to her that if she didn’t know I was roped in to help or that my colleague was struggling to manage the workload that she might have inadvertently gave me another project without realising that I already have my plate full. She even said it was a smart decision to get me to help out in order to keep the project running smoothly but that my colleague should have consulted with either the director or the account manager first so that everyone would be in the loop.

From that meeting, I understood the importance of communicating within the team and even small issues like this need to be nipped in the bud, which thankfully my director did, before it became a bigger problem.

That’s the end of my first reflective blog! Hope all of you learned a little something or found it an interesting read. Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!

Aaron Wilfred
14375051
Curtin Singapore